Tracks Horsma Raceway
- Thread starter Ghoults
- Start date
-
- Tags
- fantasy permanent circuit wip
I have to say i'm looking forward for the release of this. I really like the look of the track already. Keep up the good work 
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
Wee... Eh monthly update!
Found some setup sheets from a real car for a car I've been wanting to drive in a sim for many years so I stopped the track for a while to get this thing into the game. Here's couple of laps on the trophy layout:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/402516105
Would love me some camber and toe on solid rear axles but it is really fun even without it. I don't plan to develop it much further graphically. Physically it is great although only result of couple of days of work. Anyone who guesses which car it is gets a picture of cookie as a reward! I want specific series, year, brand and model.
As for the track have been adding some smaller bits. Made some marshalls although it was difficult to find good cc0 models and textures. In the end made two types of marshalls. Ones with orange uniforms using the kunos driver model (which I think is ok to be used for assetto only release) and other one with normal clothing. Then made about 7 or 8 different faces and clothes, rigged all the models and posed them around the track. Also made an atv model, ambulances and some fire extinguishers. Here's results of that work:
https://i.imgur.com/VqfzgBp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/XoTdRih.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zRuLl2b.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NBReMft.jpg
Then took some time to add barriers to block off different track layouts. Also put some effort into blocking possible shortcuts. There are still few. (Maybe I should leave them for myself for later use).
Kerbs are 99.9% final I think. I may need to adjust the material settings but I'm not sure if I can do any better than this. Started applying some modifiers for the physical meshes. Now the dark patches of the road have small height change in road surface so you feel them when you drive over them. Also separated the oil spill sandy patches on their own objects with their dust effects. I know those would normally wear out and vanish pretty quickly but I like the look of them.
https://i.imgur.com/LgTGIoV.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/JsCHMZs.jpg
Also did a little bit of optimizations. I still have lots of work to on that. All my white lines for example are made of 30cm long blocks. Optimizing those alone will not bring a massive improvement but there are many such areas I could improve. Both my tris and dip counts are high but not impossibly so. Dip goes from 600 to 2000 iirc and tris is maybe around 3 million. Simply smarter uv wrapping should help with some objects and some objects have geometry that doesn't need to be there. Like my 3d guard rails which I'm planning to keep! ...in strategic places I think maybe (probably not)
Found some setup sheets from a real car for a car I've been wanting to drive in a sim for many years so I stopped the track for a while to get this thing into the game. Here's couple of laps on the trophy layout:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/402516105
Would love me some camber and toe on solid rear axles but it is really fun even without it. I don't plan to develop it much further graphically. Physically it is great although only result of couple of days of work. Anyone who guesses which car it is gets a picture of cookie as a reward! I want specific series, year, brand and model.
As for the track have been adding some smaller bits. Made some marshalls although it was difficult to find good cc0 models and textures. In the end made two types of marshalls. Ones with orange uniforms using the kunos driver model (which I think is ok to be used for assetto only release) and other one with normal clothing. Then made about 7 or 8 different faces and clothes, rigged all the models and posed them around the track. Also made an atv model, ambulances and some fire extinguishers. Here's results of that work:
https://i.imgur.com/VqfzgBp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/XoTdRih.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zRuLl2b.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NBReMft.jpg
Then took some time to add barriers to block off different track layouts. Also put some effort into blocking possible shortcuts. There are still few. (Maybe I should leave them for myself for later use).
Kerbs are 99.9% final I think. I may need to adjust the material settings but I'm not sure if I can do any better than this. Started applying some modifiers for the physical meshes. Now the dark patches of the road have small height change in road surface so you feel them when you drive over them. Also separated the oil spill sandy patches on their own objects with their dust effects. I know those would normally wear out and vanish pretty quickly but I like the look of them.
https://i.imgur.com/LgTGIoV.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/JsCHMZs.jpg
Also did a little bit of optimizations. I still have lots of work to on that. All my white lines for example are made of 30cm long blocks. Optimizing those alone will not bring a massive improvement but there are many such areas I could improve. Both my tris and dip counts are high but not impossibly so. Dip goes from 600 to 2000 iirc and tris is maybe around 3 million. Simply smarter uv wrapping should help with some objects and some objects have geometry that doesn't need to be there. Like my 3d guard rails which I'm planning to keep! ...in strategic places I think maybe (probably not)
@Ghoults, if you're still planning on going for the weathered/neglected look for this track ('somewhat worn out' was the phrase you used) then I'd be glad to help with producing some old knackered billboards, if you want them. I've done some recently for a few tracks and they're good fun to play around with.
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
It's been a while since last update! I had my ssd die so I lost couple of weeks of work. I did not lose any data. Just lost time as it was my operating system drive. Anyways I am currently working towards beta version. I just need 3d grass plus some other things and then I can start bothering my beta testers for bugs an things I've missed. The track also comes with complete matchmaker and single player career. More on that later.
I'll send you a pm.
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Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
I have been completely focused on improving the fps and performance for the last couple of weeks. I was a bit surprised to hear from others that there were performance issues as I used to run the track on full world details against full fields (like 20) of gt3s for example and I never saw hiccups or fps issues. But as I looked into it I found lots of issues. For example I had a fence that had like 20k tris at one spot and some of the other objects were in similar tris range. I had also forgot to make lower poly versions of many of the objects and as such I had lots of tris that you could never notice unless you parked right next to the. Also very few objects had lods or lodout values. Making those plus other things helped bring down the tris count 50% for the scene even if I did not really remove close to that amount from the models. So far the results have been promising and I still have things to change to improve the performance.
I also did some tests with grass and accidentally gained some 50 drawcalls there compared to my earlier 3d grass. I'd guess I had not set them up correctly last time around. I still need to redo the 3d grass to make it match better with the ground. Mostly small texture and particle tweaks. In some places it looks passable, in others pretty awful.
Pictures:
I also did some tests with grass and accidentally gained some 50 drawcalls there compared to my earlier 3d grass. I'd guess I had not set them up correctly last time around. I still need to redo the 3d grass to make it match better with the ground. Mostly small texture and particle tweaks. In some places it looks passable, in others pretty awful.
Pictures:
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
Second attemp at 3d grass. I did mess up and made a wrong kind of mesh for my flowers which means they all rest on their sides on the ground. You could say that it simulates the effect of being driven over but they also levitate 20cm off the ground... Only noticed it when taking screenshots. After I have done the 3d grass for the whole track I need to go over and remove the pieces over the asphalt and then add some more manually to certain places. Like grass growing through cracks in the road.
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
I thought uv mapping was boring then I used particles to make trees and grass. I never knew how good I had it!Where is the "I feel your pain" emoji?
Thanks. I'm reading all your and lilski's post trying to steal as many as possible! I stole your idea about the grass size changing near the track edges too. I really like the effect it makes. Makes the grass a lot less uniformNice texture work, though - your track is looking good
please check for grass over the tarmac, you can clearly see a few 3d grass extending over the tarmac on the 1st pic
Looks really good, are those ads 100% fictional or are those real random brands? They fit good. Also like those open bricks you used there on the inside of the corner, hope we can feel them aswell
Also, it may be because you used evening/morning time setting, but does everything appear a little dark? How does it look at 12 noon?
Also, it may be because you used evening/morning time setting, but does everything appear a little dark? How does it look at 12 noon?
He's on blender and there is no issue using particles for trees there.Be careful using particles for trees if you are using 3ds max. I tried that on Feldbergring and had a devil of a job getting the normals right. Plus, scatter objects would not work well as kstree_group objects either
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
Yes:
Ads are fictional but Mascot is making ad addon with real life brands. What open bricks are you talking about tho? If you mean the road patches then yes those can be felt too.Looks really good, are those ads 100% fictional or are those real random brands? They fit good. Also like those open bricks you used there on the inside of the corner, hope we can feel them aswell
Also, it may be because you used evening/morning time setting, but does everything appear a little dark? How does it look at 12 noon?
The time is 11:40 in content manager. Date is late september so maybe it is that as the track is quite north.
No such problems with blender. My only real issues with blender is that it is pretty slow converting from particles to meshes (it only uses one core for those operations). And the blender's particle system is a bit wonky but also very flexible. I can't really complain. Particle node system which hopefully come to blender in the future will make it easier to manage and combine the placement textures but other than that the blender system is really good for things like grass and trees.Be careful using particles for trees if you are using 3ds max. I tried that on Feldbergring and had a devil of a job getting the normals right. Plus, scatter objects would not work well as kstree_group objects either
I did try using ue4 for grass but it was not very good workflow because once you export anything to ue4 for any reason you can't change it anymore in blender because the two files would go un-sync. There were some other issues too that I don't remember anymore.
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
I thought I'd look into some numbers what it took for me to make this track:
Total project folder size: 68.9GB
Out of which textures are 60%
Blender files is about 20% which also includes many previous versions.
And the rest is mostly various reference image files. And then some txt files.
Main blender file size: 645MB
Total number of textures: about 160. Not all are used anymore but each of them was hand made at some point.
I am not into photography so this makes the project size probably smaller than the track projects of those people who took lots of photos. Photos can add up very quickly I'd imagine.
How much time? If we assume one hour per one texture which on average might be true you get 160 hours just in textures. Driving on the track is a more diffucult to estimate but from content manager I know that I have driven at least 6000 kilometers. That is about 1130 completed laps. Assuming average lap time of 2 minutes you get 38 hours. If you start from pits and sometimes crash out that 38 hours is a pretty low estimate. Especially considering I had not switched to cm when I started making the track. Then you have time spent watching tutorial videos, searching for reference and material pics, learning ac track making and trying new software. Let's say 40 hours spent there.
That puts us already at 238 hours and that does not include any 3d work. And for sure the 3d work is the biggest time sink. Maybe another 400 hours? So 638 hours in total. 100 days 6 hours per week? Oldest file I have my hard drive in this project folder is from 14th of june 2018. Sounds about right as it was thereabouts I started this project. So about two weeks ago it was the 1 year anniversary for this project. And while june 2019 release won't happen I am optimistic this will be out next month. That would put my daily average to 1.8 hours every day.
The track has changed during this time a lot too. A lot more in the beginning but as the design matured I made conscious effort to leave it alone. Here is a quick image I made that shows the track layout changes:
As you can see the original track layout looked very different. While not visible in the pic it had much steeper elevation changes and lots of corners that looked great on paper but don't really work out once you try to put a race car through them. The main thing that killed the first version is the tunnel that went under the pit area. This also created issues with elevations because to go go under the pit area you needed the track be lower which meant that all corners between turn 1 and the tunnel were downhill. Not to mention the headaches of building that in 3d!
So in second version I simply mirrored and rotated the first corners to avoid having tunnels. I know eerybody loves a good tunnel in a race track but it just didn't work out. After that I wanted to look at different layouts. I knew I wanted more than one but I did not want to add a nordschleife or sudschleife to the track. The idea was to have one short layout and one fast one in addition to the main layout. So those were added to version 3.
One of my goals was to keep the track length somewhere between 4 and 5 kilometers. 6 is too much and 7 is almost hopeless for a fantasy track. I did fail at this as the full layout turned out to be 5.2 kilometers long. But it was almost 7 kilometers long at version 3. And to make things worse those first corners were very slow and boring in anything that had more than 300bhp. So I just deleted the horseshoe bit and brought the first corners closer to s/f line and that's how we got to 4.
This created one more issue that was the main straight. It was a bit too short so I had to make it longer (again). This also made the straight behind the pit area longer. I really really like the turn 2-3-4 area of the track now. It really flows well and you can just keep attacking it to brake deeper and gain time. But if go just too fast you end up in the gravel trap. The track definitely starts with a high note with the fast turn 1 and then the fast but technical turn 2-3-4. After that 5th version I added couple of turns and made the track narrower. The main issue with the current track is that it has no room in the pits as the backstraight squeezes the pit area to this long narrow space. The good thing is that f1 will never visit here because of that! Here's an image showing the track as it is now:
You can also watch onboard laps of the different versions here:
https://www.twitch.tv/simvids/videos
I'll see if I can make a video of the first first version with the tunnel. It was very ugly thing back then.
This project sort of started when I one day looked at ac and thought about how difficult it is to make a track for ac. So I watched some blender tutorials (curve and array modifiers) and started working. Only after maybe couple of hours I was driving on the track in ac. It was just a proof on concept at that point. Basically a deformed oval (that quickly started becoming more complex). But it was surprisingly easy to get going. The documentation is pretty good, there are excellent user made tutorials and posts describing various things and the ac sdk is pretty amazing as well. Ac is very error resilient and has very few hard stops that stop a car or track loading into the game I've found.
You may wonder how did I get to the first version. The thing is I made an rf1 track about 10 years ago in bob's track builder:
Those with keen eyes can surely spot some similarities. (Turn the image upsidedown.) The first turns were very similar and it also has that tail before last corner. Start/finish straight is in the same place but on the other side of the track.
In the end the rf track was more of an inspiration than anything more than that for this project though. At one point I thought about making a conversion but decided I wanted to make some changes. A lot of them. In the end I took some corners, took elevations from some spots and tried to get rid of the bad spots. Try to make something different as well. And then worked from there. In the end everything that came from that rf track is the basic sketch for the layout. It gave me excellent starting point as I had something usable and drivable very quickly in ac.
I still have the rf track files. It was a real release back then. Not a project that sort of died. You can even go back in my post history to find the making of and release threads for it. Back then rd did not host files so the images and videos are dead. But I just checked and the download link there still works.
There are still some issues and missing things and one of them is corner names. If you have suggestions then look at the map below and post here if you have ideas for certain corners or just corner names in general:
All the numbered corners are fair game. I'll choose the best suggestions and use them for the track.
Total project folder size: 68.9GB
Out of which textures are 60%
Blender files is about 20% which also includes many previous versions.
And the rest is mostly various reference image files. And then some txt files.
Main blender file size: 645MB
Total number of textures: about 160. Not all are used anymore but each of them was hand made at some point.
I am not into photography so this makes the project size probably smaller than the track projects of those people who took lots of photos. Photos can add up very quickly I'd imagine.
How much time? If we assume one hour per one texture which on average might be true you get 160 hours just in textures. Driving on the track is a more diffucult to estimate but from content manager I know that I have driven at least 6000 kilometers. That is about 1130 completed laps. Assuming average lap time of 2 minutes you get 38 hours. If you start from pits and sometimes crash out that 38 hours is a pretty low estimate. Especially considering I had not switched to cm when I started making the track. Then you have time spent watching tutorial videos, searching for reference and material pics, learning ac track making and trying new software. Let's say 40 hours spent there.
That puts us already at 238 hours and that does not include any 3d work. And for sure the 3d work is the biggest time sink. Maybe another 400 hours? So 638 hours in total. 100 days 6 hours per week? Oldest file I have my hard drive in this project folder is from 14th of june 2018. Sounds about right as it was thereabouts I started this project. So about two weeks ago it was the 1 year anniversary for this project. And while june 2019 release won't happen I am optimistic this will be out next month. That would put my daily average to 1.8 hours every day.
The track has changed during this time a lot too. A lot more in the beginning but as the design matured I made conscious effort to leave it alone. Here is a quick image I made that shows the track layout changes:
As you can see the original track layout looked very different. While not visible in the pic it had much steeper elevation changes and lots of corners that looked great on paper but don't really work out once you try to put a race car through them. The main thing that killed the first version is the tunnel that went under the pit area. This also created issues with elevations because to go go under the pit area you needed the track be lower which meant that all corners between turn 1 and the tunnel were downhill. Not to mention the headaches of building that in 3d!
So in second version I simply mirrored and rotated the first corners to avoid having tunnels. I know eerybody loves a good tunnel in a race track but it just didn't work out. After that I wanted to look at different layouts. I knew I wanted more than one but I did not want to add a nordschleife or sudschleife to the track. The idea was to have one short layout and one fast one in addition to the main layout. So those were added to version 3.
One of my goals was to keep the track length somewhere between 4 and 5 kilometers. 6 is too much and 7 is almost hopeless for a fantasy track. I did fail at this as the full layout turned out to be 5.2 kilometers long. But it was almost 7 kilometers long at version 3. And to make things worse those first corners were very slow and boring in anything that had more than 300bhp. So I just deleted the horseshoe bit and brought the first corners closer to s/f line and that's how we got to 4.
This created one more issue that was the main straight. It was a bit too short so I had to make it longer (again). This also made the straight behind the pit area longer. I really really like the turn 2-3-4 area of the track now. It really flows well and you can just keep attacking it to brake deeper and gain time. But if go just too fast you end up in the gravel trap. The track definitely starts with a high note with the fast turn 1 and then the fast but technical turn 2-3-4. After that 5th version I added couple of turns and made the track narrower. The main issue with the current track is that it has no room in the pits as the backstraight squeezes the pit area to this long narrow space. The good thing is that f1 will never visit here because of that! Here's an image showing the track as it is now:
You can also watch onboard laps of the different versions here:
https://www.twitch.tv/simvids/videos
I'll see if I can make a video of the first first version with the tunnel. It was very ugly thing back then.
This project sort of started when I one day looked at ac and thought about how difficult it is to make a track for ac. So I watched some blender tutorials (curve and array modifiers) and started working. Only after maybe couple of hours I was driving on the track in ac. It was just a proof on concept at that point. Basically a deformed oval (that quickly started becoming more complex). But it was surprisingly easy to get going. The documentation is pretty good, there are excellent user made tutorials and posts describing various things and the ac sdk is pretty amazing as well. Ac is very error resilient and has very few hard stops that stop a car or track loading into the game I've found.
You may wonder how did I get to the first version. The thing is I made an rf1 track about 10 years ago in bob's track builder:
Those with keen eyes can surely spot some similarities. (Turn the image upsidedown.) The first turns were very similar and it also has that tail before last corner. Start/finish straight is in the same place but on the other side of the track.
In the end the rf track was more of an inspiration than anything more than that for this project though. At one point I thought about making a conversion but decided I wanted to make some changes. A lot of them. In the end I took some corners, took elevations from some spots and tried to get rid of the bad spots. Try to make something different as well. And then worked from there. In the end everything that came from that rf track is the basic sketch for the layout. It gave me excellent starting point as I had something usable and drivable very quickly in ac.
I still have the rf track files. It was a real release back then. Not a project that sort of died. You can even go back in my post history to find the making of and release threads for it. Back then rd did not host files so the images and videos are dead. But I just checked and the download link there still works.
There are still some issues and missing things and one of them is corner names. If you have suggestions then look at the map below and post here if you have ideas for certain corners or just corner names in general:
Last edited:
Ghoults
Lasse Luisu
Here's an onboard video of the first draft of this track from about a year ago:
I did smooth it out it some before that video as as it was too rough to really drive cleanly. Also changed the textures as the original one used borrowed textures. So it was even much worse back then. It is still very rough and barely has any road cambers, no bumps and some places suffer from staircasis syndrome. It is barely drivable but you get the idea how it was. In some places when I was driving I had to lift just because the elevations are so sudden that the gt cars would nose up and go straight to the wall if you had even little bit too much speed.
